Using the MS stack for a situation where you will have huge spikes of activity on an app with an expected lifespan of less than 24 hours is not best practice.
I'm an open source developer – working on Linux servers since 1997 or so, etc. etc. Please stop what you're doing: it's not very funny and it's not helpful, but it does give OSS people a bad reputation.
You can host plenty of high volume things on Microsoft's code – Azure, Bing, etc. have proven scale. We can argue about cost, ease of use, etc. but a decent team should have no trouble making a serious service. The problem here is that they didn't hire a decent team – from the sounds of it, it was the usual executive-level schmoozing and managerial incomplete you see throughout large organizations of every type. They could have used HN'a favorite stack and failed just as hard.
The way you're doing it won't will anyone over. Open source has been winning where I work because we've demonstrated better results with less cost. I suggest you try to outperform rather than out-market.
